THE BLUE HEN
Des Dillon

The closing down of the steelworks meant the end of being in work – but John and his pal don’t intend it to be the end.  ‘Keep hens!  That’s the answer.’ 

“Greenend was all  four-in-a-block houses.  In the late seventies it was rough. The roughest scheme in Coatbridge.  Me and John up the stairs thought it couldn’t get any rougher.  We were wrong 

Me and John shared a garden.  We kept it in good nick.  Planted tatties and radishes and tomatoes. Every night we’d come home from the Klondike and do a couple of hours before we got washed up. The whole scheme worked in the Klondike.  Made steel tubes for gas pipelines and giant steel rolls for the car industry.  Big Bannan worked there too and even though he done a bit of money-lending, he was an alright guy. 

‘Never had a bad bone in his body back then,’ John said.  That was going to change.  Big style. 

I mind the time Bannan brung in six eggs and we fried them on a Motherwell-Number-Nine shovel heated up in the furnace.  We flung them on rolls and scoffed them with a can of Carlsberg Special each.  They were the days.  Life was good. Life was two rolls on egg. Life was the snow melting on the black corrugated roof of the Klondike and us three slugging lager.” 

RRP: £5.95
ISBN: 0-9546333-0-X

A BOOK TO SIT BESIDE ‘OF MICE AND MEN’. 

Level: 2
SMOG: 13-13

Buy this book from Amazon
Buy this book from Books from Scotland
Buy this book from Borders
Buy this book from Waterstones

[ HINTERLAND ]